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Friday, 9 May 2014

Linda Crosfield

Linda Crosfield, Rodeo Nights (2014)

Linda Crosfield, Rodeo Nights

Linda Crosfield, Rodeo Nights

Linda Crosfield, Rodeo Nights

It was my pleasure to meet Linda Crosfield at the recent Cascadia Poetry gathering. Her warm and earthy poems were one of the many highlights of the gathering. Above is a sampling from her 2014 chapbook, Rodeo Nights, bound in hand-painted Amate bark paper from Mexico, where this collection was published (La Manzanilla del Mar, to be precise).

Many of the poems are prefaced with an epigraph drawn from George Bowering's 1970 chapbook, Imago No 12, Sitting in Mexico. Drawn in by the exquisite covers, I stayed to enjoy the poems.

Linda's passion for poetry extends to a line of chapbook productions, NIB (Nose in Book) Press, based in Castlegar BC (most of the time). Rodeo Nights is one sample, and this 2013 collection of new Mexico meditations, some forty years on from the Imago collection, is another:

Of this recent collection by George Bowering, she writes:

In Los Pájaros de TenacatitaGeorge looks at life in general and Mexican life in particular—its birds, its kids, its visiting gringos—with depth, compassion and characteristic Bowering humour. Written in La Manzanilla del Mar, Mexico in January 2013, each of the poems is a fulcrum which consists of six lines divided into couplets. Cuban poet, Pablo Medina, describes how he came up with the form here.

2 comments:

Beautifully penned review of Crosfield's book with a nod to Bowering's as well...makes me wish once again that I'd made more of an effort to get to Cascadia. It sounds like it was an amazing time! Glad to see Crosfield in particular getting so well-deserved notice and ink.